Pale Moon is a custom-built and optimized Firefox-based browser for Windows operating systems with current, high performance processors. It looks identical to the standard Firefox browser and supports Firefox extensions, themes and identities.

Features:

Highly optimized for modern processors

100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.

Uses slightly less memory because of disabled redundant and optional code

Significant speed increases for page drawing and script processing

Stability: experience fewer browser crashes.

Support for SVG and Canvas, and downloadable fonts including WOFF

Support for HTML5 and WebGL (v4+)

Support for Firefox extensions (add-ons), themes and personas

Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plugin execution)

Able to use existing Firefox bookmarks and settings with this migration tool

Version 12.1 is a major update to the browser, implementing a number of visual and under-the-hood changes.

Dynamic smooth scrolling algorithm for mouse/keyboard implemented. Smooth scrolling is now also enabled by default.

Update to the status bar code to fix pop-up status not switching sides on mouse-over, as well as using a safer allocation/destruction mechanism for controls (potentially preventing memory leaks).

Fixed: cache size override on new profiles (would be set to 1GB instead of the application default of 200MB). Bug 20120512-GN.

Addition of a number of preferences in the Tabs category of the options dialog box:

A checkbox for inserting related tabs next to the current tab when opening a link;

A checkbox for closing the browser window when the last tab is closed;

A selection for new tabs: Choose from a blank page, the Pale Moon start page or the Quickdial page.

Some slight color has been re-introduced in the navigation elements to improve clarity of the UI.

Disabled an image decoding library with hazardous code. This has no impact on the browser's image decoding capabilities or performance as alternative methods for decoding are used by default.

Some changes to memory handling which potentially keep memory use better within bounds.

A change to the build environment to improve stability of Javascript. Note that this is a trade-off and may result in a slight drop in synthetic benchmarking performance of the browser compared to the previous version of Pale Moon. The impact of this on overall real-world performance of the browser is negligible.